I spent five years chasing productivity dragons—mastering GTD, meditating at 5 AM, and crafting the perfect morning routine. Know what happened? I built a beautiful system that looked impressive but produced mediocre work.
The truth? Most productivity advice is elaborate scaffolding around a hollow core.
True productivity isn’t about checking boxes or clearing inboxes. It’s about meaningful output that matters to you and others. Everything else is just productivity theater—impressive to observers but ultimately empty.
Let’s cut through the noise and focus on the essential skills that actually move the needle.
Ruthless Elimination
The most productive people don’t do more things. They do fewer things better.
Here’s a framework I use with clients:
- List everything you’re working on or planning to work on
- For each item, ask: “If this were the only thing I accomplished this year, would I be satisfied?”
- If the answer is no, eliminate it or delegate it
This isn’t some feel-good exercise. It’s surgery—cutting away what’s merely good to make room for what could be great.
Apple Implementation: Create a “Not Doing” list in Notes or Reminders. Review it weekly. Each time you’re tempted to start something new, add it there first and let it cool off for 48 hours.
As Warren Buffett says, he doesn’t “prioritize” his schedule—he schedules his priorities. The distinction matters.
Deep Work Mechanics
The ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks is becoming increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
Most people mistake motion for creation. They respond to emails, check messages, and attend meetings—activities that feel productive but often produce nothing of lasting value.
The mechanics of deep work are simple but not easy:
- Block 90-minute sessions in your calendar for focused work
- Disable all notifications during these blocks
- Define a clear outcome for each session
- Create a starting ritual (mine is brewing coffee while reviewing my objective)
- Track your deep work hours weekly (what gets measured improves)
Apple Implementation: Use Focus modes to automatically silence notifications during scheduled deep work blocks. Customize which apps and people can break through based on context.
I tracked my deep work hours for three months. The correlation between those hours and meaningful output was nearly perfect. Everything else—meetings, email, “networking”—contributed surprisingly little.
Energy Management
Your cognitive capacity is finite. Pretending otherwise is like pretending your phone battery never dies.
I wasted years trying to power through afternoon slumps, wondering why my 3PM decisions were garbage compared to my 10AM insights.
Instead of fighting your energy rhythms, map them:
- Track your energy, focus, and mood for two weeks at 90-minute intervals
- Identify your peak cognitive periods
- Schedule your most demanding work during these times
- Use low-energy periods for administrative tasks, meetings, or recovery
The Energy Audit Template:
| Time | Energy (1-10) | Focus (1-10) | Mood (1-10) | Activity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8:00 | 7 | 8 | 6 | |
| 9:30 | 8 | 9 | 7 | Writing |
| 11:00 | 7 | 6 | 7 | Meeting |
Apple Implementation: Create a shortcut that prompts you to rate these metrics throughout the day, then dumps the data into Numbers for analysis.
A creative director I work with called this “obvious advice.” Six months later, he told me it transformed his studio’s output. The obvious things, consistently applied, often yield extraordinary results.
Strategic Laziness
The most effective people I know appear lazy to others. They’re not rushing. They’re not “always on.” They have margins in their life.
Strategic laziness means:
- Building recovery into your workflow
- Creating systems that handle routine decisions
- Letting problems solve themselves when possible
- Saying no to almost everything
Some practical applications:
- For every 90 minutes of deep work, take a genuine 15-minute break
- Design “set it and forget it” systems for recurring tasks
- Set artificial deadlines well before actual ones
- Schedule blank space in your calendar for thinking and recovery
I once worked with a designer who left the studio at 5PM sharp while others stayed until 8. Management thought she lacked dedication until they realized she consistently outproduced everyone else. She wasn’t working less—she was eliminating waste.
Apple Implementation: Use Shortcuts to automate routine tasks. Set up Text Replacement for common responses. Use Screen Time limits to enforce boundaries.
Effective Starting
Most productivity problems aren’t finishing problems—they’re starting problems disguised as finishing problems.
We delay beginning difficult work, then compensate with heroic last-minute efforts that burn us out. The solution isn’t better time management; it’s better initiation management.
The five-minute rule has saved countless creative projects:
- Commit to working on your most important task for just five minutes
- After five minutes, decide whether to continue
- If you continue, work in 25-minute increments with five-minute breaks
This works because beginning is far harder than continuing. Once you start, momentum carries you forward.
Apple Implementation: Create a “Start Mode” focus that blocks distracting apps for just five minutes. Make it easily accessible from your home screen.
The difference between professionals and amateurs isn’t willpower—it’s systems that make starting inevitable.
Decisive Completion
Half-finished projects drain more energy than completed ones. The psychological weight of open loops—tasks you’ve started but not finished—can cripple your creative capacity.
The completion checklist:
- Define “done” in advance for every project
- Create exit criteria for meetings and collaborations
- Establish regular reviews to close or kill stalled projects
- Celebrate completions, not just progress
Here’s the brutal truth: a portfolio of completed B+ work outperforms a drawer full of unfinished A- projects every time.
Apple Implementation: Create a “Completions” album in Photos. Take a screenshot or photo of each completed project, no matter how small. Review monthly to remind yourself of your ability to finish things.
Environmental Design
Your environment shapes your behavior more than your intentions do.
The most disciplined creatives I know don’t rely on willpower—they design environments that make good decisions easy and bad decisions hard.
Environmental productivity hacks:
- Create context-specific workspaces (even in a small apartment, designate different areas for different types of work)
- Remove friction from desired behaviors (if you want to read more, keep books in every room)
- Add friction to distractions (delete social apps, require two-factor authentication for time-wasting sites)
- Use visual cues to trigger productive states (a specific notebook, candle, or soundtrack can become a Pavlovian trigger for focus)
Apple Implementation: Create separate user accounts on your Mac for different types of work, each with relevant bookmarks, apps, and desktop arrangements.
The Anti-Productivity System
The skills above aren’t about doing more. They’re about doing what matters and eliminating everything else.
The greatest productivity hack is building a creative practice you don’t need to escape from.
Forget inbox zero. Aim for regret zero.
Ask yourself: “When I look back at today from a year in the future, will I be proud of how I spent it?”
Most productivity systems fail because they help you manage tasks you shouldn’t be doing in the first place. They optimize processes that should be eliminated entirely.
The most effective creators I know don’t use complicated systems. They’ve mastered these essential skills that let them focus on what actually matters—making things that last.
Strip away the complexity. Focus on elimination, deep work, energy management, strategic laziness, effective starting, decisive completion, and environmental design.
The rest is just noise.